


At Home, at the End of the World

by reserve



Category: Homeland
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve/pseuds/reserve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After successfully helping Brody flee to Canada, Carrie heads across the border months later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Home, at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [icedteainthebag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icedteainthebag/gifts).



> Spoilers: through Season 2. I think this is obviously the seed of a larger work (much like every paper I wrote in college). If you enjoyed this, I hope you'll bookmark it and check back later as the story will likely expand and evolve in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading.

After eight months, Carrie visits him. Rick never found his way back to Ilsa, but she doesn't care.[1] She has: a fake passport, expertly crafted; red hair[2], & glasses before she reaches the border. She doesn’t bother to steal across, she goes leisurely.  Takes a long drive up Route 1 in a borrowed car from an old Princeton classmate, reconnected with at the 10 year reunion she’d never intended to go to.  
  
There’s no rent-a-car, no flights, no tickets-- Just Carrie Matheson, the sea coast road she travelled with her father up from Baltimore on one of his generally lone manic journeys, and some expert radar lovingly donated by Virgil _who understands_ , and Max who cares for almost no reason other than Virgil does. ("Just in case there are officers looking out, just in case," Virgil tells her.)   
  
She’s still with the CIA, and for the past months she and Saul have been working to rebuild the company almost hand-in-hand. The days are eternal, she's the lonliest she's ever been. She still takes her Lithium. She’s still in her own apartment. Al Queda still haunts the nightly news and their bullpen. Even after her breakdown, she manages to have some paid vacation.  
  
The trip to _Canada_ \-- somehow magical on the tongue now, troubled chiefly by strategic moose movement (“they’re travelling further south, their numbers growing,” writes Brody in a letter, sent to a PO Box in Pennsylvania that she checks weekly. “Surely you jest,” she writes back, amused), and the largely unpopulated rural areas where drug trafficking is taking hold -- allows her to almost feel safe knowing she’s about to leave her homeland rather than staying there. Then again, she’s never been the safest feeling person to begin with; paranoia always sneaking in at the corners, half the disorder half _spy_.  
  
Along Route 1 (historic RTE 1, charted over post-roads and rivers, travelling idly from Florida to Maine), she buys Brody a vest without weaponry to keep him warm in his benign adopted country, and herself salt-water taffy [3] from the Jersey Shore, still in ruins from the hurricane back in Autumn. It’s long after Christmas now, and her sister bid her farewell with an extra vial of lithium and 10 clonazepam just in case things got too painful. Not enough, however, if white wine should somehow become involved and deeply swallowable.  
  
There’s no snow on the ground in DC when Carrie leaves, but then again, it never seems to be winter there any more, and she barely notices the cold anyway. Quintessentially hot-blooded (“Like me,” says dad), moving, except for when she’s not, and now she is, firmly up the coast. In Connecticut she stops off in New Haven, sees a former colleague now teaching political science at Yale. They wolf down burgers in a parking lot[4], and she fucks him, not in the car, mostly because she can, and old habits die harder than terrorist cell leaders, that’s for sure.  
  
In Massachusetts, she eats a roast beef sandwich and covers her face in barbeque sauce, laughing in the mirror when she pulls over at a gas station to clean up in the bathroom. She spends that night at a motel (The Knight’s Inn, punny, [5]) outside of the Bean, where the sheets smell musty and the Pay Per View sucks. She always longs for the real thrill of surveillance when she’s not working, and in the end, she takes out her laptop and masturbates in the bathtub (scrubbed down first, cleaning supplies filched from a supply closet), the computer perched precariously on the closed toilet seat, tuned via the motel wireless to some grainy pornography, a couple fucking roughly in an alley. It may have been taped without their knowledge.  
  
The next day, day three on the road, she drives further faster. She hits Maine hard, doesn’t bother with New Hampshire. The cell phone she purchased for the journey (only Brody has the number) buzzes with texts from her exiled terrorist lover whose name she finds herself whispering when it gets dark and she rolls into Bangor almost out of gas. Carrie checks her phone as she walks into a CVS.  
  
 _I can’t wait to see you._  
  
She chooses out hair dye.  
  
 _We’ll drink coffee together on my porch, we’ll wrap up in blankets._ [6]  
  
She buys a red bull.  
  
 _The snow is deep here._  
  
She checks the car to make sure she brought her Sorels, not much needed in DC, required during an Afghan winter in the mountains.  
  
 _I want to be inside you._  
  
She takes a calming triangular pill as she checks into her motel room for that night. In the bathroom with (yes) a glass of wine, she finally dyes her hair red. Safest to do it now, safest to wait until she was closer to the border.  
  
In the morning, she crosses into Canada at Houlton, her glasses planted on the bridge of her nose, new eyes for a new era. Cool, calm, collected, and munching on a piece of taffy to keep from grinning as the border control looks over her passport.  
  
“I’m vacationing in Hallifax. They say it’s beautiful in winter; like Scandinavia but better, and closer. Yeah, I’ll be staying alone. No, I have no pets with me.” Munch, munch, munch.  
  
Honestly, she’s never been to Canada. She had to look into what kind of adapter her phone would need (none). But this was so easy, so easy. She passes placidly through New Brunswick, ambles blithely through Nova Scotia. Then she reaches the ferry, her aquatic transport to Newfoundland, from which she'll drive to Corner Brook, the island's lone large western city: remote and quiet, with a thriving fishing economy.  
  
 _I smell like cod. It’s depressing, but better than blood, haha._  
  
 _What’s your ETA?_  
  
She swallows, roughly. Imagines him choking her, but only for a moment. She drives her car onto the ferry, waves goodbye to the snowy mainland [7], waves goodbye to Sydney Mines from the aft, the wind whipping her hair hard into her face like lashes. _Porphyria's Love_ r, she yearns not to be, besides, she’s the obsessive one (but he’s the murderous one). She slips her fake glasses into her purse before they dock.  
  
From the Ferry, she takes Newfoundland’s Route 1 (it’s thematic, thematic), all the way to Corner Brook, to Griffith Drive, where Brody has set up shop[8], is hiding out, is fishing cod, and letting his hands get rough again. He's a far cry from the fallen American congressman, with a hint of accent that stumbled out of nowhere infiltrating his voice. He's a classic chameleon, she swears ("When you fight monsters, be careful that ... you do not become one," -Frédéric Bourdin).

  
The back door is open when Carrie arrives at his house. His shoes (three pairs) are lined straight in the mudroom. That chalky snow stain mars the doormat. She tugs out her ponytail in the mirror, pulls a face at herself and brushes her long bangs off her forehead. It’s a secret slut haircut, she says.    
  
"Hey?" he calls out.  
  
"Hey," she says.  
  
And then he’s on her, launches himself at her. For a moment, she can’t tell if it’s lust or if she should be acting in self-defense. He has a beard now[9], it scratches against her as he rubs his face on her neck, licks below her ear.  
  
"Whoa, whoa buddy," she hears herself say, as she presses a staying hand to chest, which stills him. He looks up at her, his eyes squinty.  
  
"I’m sorry, I just. I want."

His voice is husky, and she knows, she wants. They are masters of the back and forth and this is a far cry from the normal people conversation in her own cabin months ago. But they. They can’t stop, won’t stop, could never stop, or at least she couldn’t.  
  
"There is a lot of snow here," she says, almost extracting herself from his embrace. "I haven’t slept much this past day," she says. "Sleep is important, you know, for my thing.'  
  
"Let’s sleep," he replies, and takes her hand.  
  
She’s never been here and he’s never sent pictures. Clearly their home in Baltimore was all Jessica. Brody isn’t so Walmart meets _Garden & Gun_. He’s homier somehow, with blankets on his two small couches, and an old TV in the corner. Everything smells like him; she’s never been somewhere that smelled so strongly of him that his scent was in her mouth. He does smell a little like cod.  
  
Brody leads her into his bedroom, hand on her back, her hand in his, as though he were leading a blind person. She lets him take her, he’s always been able to. He looks her over as she undresses down to her underwear and loose tank-top (driving clothes).     
  
“We could be cousins, with that red hair,” he says with the smallest smile.  
  
“I know,” she says. “I thought people might assume we’re siblings, safer that way. No suspicion. No kissing outright in public.”  
  
“I’d never,” he says.  
  
“Yeah right,” she says, and pulls back his blankets, layers and layers, and snuggles into his bed, and into more of his smells.  
  
“You came here to sleep, didn’t you.”  
  
“No,” she says sleepily. “I can sleep at home, I came here to sleep near you.”  
  
He rubs her back over the covers, slips a warm, worked hand under them to her skin. She sighs against his touch, and soon falls asleep.  
  
When she wakes up, he’s beside her, curled to her, his knees tucked into her knees, spoons together. His hand clutches her wrist as though he’ll never let her go. She has two more weeks to spend here with him, and now she considers leaving right this moment, and fleetingly has no idea why she came in the first place. Chasing the dragon, chasing a home at the end of the world. She raises his arm gently to her mouth by way of her wrist, and nibbles on him, gentle teething at his flesh.  
  
He murmurs against her neck. It’s only wait and see now.

 

1, evid: 

 

2, evid:

3, evid: 

 

4, evid: 

5, evid: 

6, evid: 

7, evid:

8, evid: 

9, evid:

**Author's Note:**

> Dear iceteainthebag, I am not sure if this is what you wanted, but this is what I ended up writing. I have to admit, this piece sort of got away from me. I was hoping to capture the voice of Carrie's wild cork-boards, hence the images at the end of the text. I had also, originally, intended to write a classic "Canadian shack" piece, as lovingly set up as canonical by the show, but I got so distracted by writing Carrie's road trip that I barely wandered into the steamy, painful Carrie/Brody PWP that I had wanted to write in the first place. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and a very merry Yule to you and yours, darling.


End file.
